This paper is concerned with the viscous liquid–gas two-phase flow model in a three-dimensional exterior domain with the slip boundary conditions. We are able to prove the existence of a global strong solution when the initial total energy is suitably small. The initial masses of liquid and gas are allowed to contain a vacuum, with no extra restriction between the initial masses of liquid and gas. It should be noted here that we consider the slip boundary condition in a three dimensional (3D) exterior domain which is in sharp contrast to result of Yu (2021) where they consider the Cauchy problem.